Sharing Early Care: Learning from Practitioners

Abstract

Shared care and chain of care are core concepts for analysing empirical variation of care arrangements for small children, involving more than one caregiver. The Norwegian context exemplifies an increased tendency among mothers to share the care of their young child with a co-parent at home, and with professional care providers at day care centres. Instead of drawing on prevailing psychological models and standards to assess the quality of arrangements of care during early childhood, we have tried to learn from how caregivers go about in their practice. In this respect we count parents as well as care providers in childcare centres as practitioners. Based upon parents’ detailed descriptions of their children’s everyday life, the paper analyses how parents involve others in the chain of care that they organise. Three cases of sharing are presented and discussed: same-gendered parents who demonstrate intensive parental sharing, parents who share with professional caregivers at day care and parents of children with special needs who do the same. Setting up care arrangements with more than one continuously engaged participant appeared as a process of gradual adaptation, not a sudden abdication from parental responsibility. Thus, the child is neither constructed as a baton in a relay race, delivered from one caregiver to the next, nor as a task that is easily split into pieces, one for each caregiver. Different caregivers did not necessarily treat the child in exactly the same way, but they coordinated their efforts in order to contribute to the subjectification and development of this particular little person.